Anyway, book 1 was the first time I’d managed to make an entire comic series from beginning to end without losing interest or giving up. I learned a lot about my creative process from it, and got a lot better at managing my attention and plotting. Book 1 was incredibly rough in places and there were a lot of dangling plot hooks that never went anywhere or got resolved in a weird way, but that was part of my ongoing learning experience with not simply making everything up as I went along. Most of my comics since then have been at least somewhat plotted out in advance (but not so closely as to make it impossible to improvise as I go).

I also learned a lot about myself along the way and of course used this as a framework for exploring aspects of my identity. My own gender stuff is always at least in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of these comics, and later on (especially in book 2) I started to explore the dichotomy between my scientific rationality with my latent spirituality. (This is, of course, a much more prominent theme in Lewi, but I digress.) And now in the year 2017 I can say that I’m… still transgender (and my genitals are finally configured correctly, although still a bit sore), and I’m also finally working towards embracing at least the ethnic side of my heritage.

Who knows, maybe in another 10 years I’ll have finally started drawing book 3!